Advertising and marketing is central to any business, especially on-line businesses that do not have direct visible interaction with customers. Advertising usually begins with a product and an advertisement for that product. Traditional methods of advertising include television commercials, billboards, magazine ads and other sources that are likely to be browsed or viewed by the public.
On-line advertising, however, is different. An on-line business that markets or sells a product must have more than a product and potential customers. It must also have on-line visibility, that is, its on-line identity must be known and visible to a potential consumer. In today's digital world, people are spending more time on the Internet. Thus, often, an on-line business' most effective source for marketing its products and services is a captive audience on the World Wide Web. An e-commerce business that has identified a product, a target audience, and has procured a website for its business must now reach out to millions, if not billions of potential consumers that are rapidly searching the Internet, visiting websites, and conducting key word searches through popular search engines such as Google™, Yahoo!™, and Bing™.
There are several potential ways an on-line e-commerce business might find a target consumer.
First, the identity and corresponding uniform resource locator (URL) of the on-line business' website may already be known to the customer. For example, a user familiar with the Amazon™ shopping website might simply enter “www.Amazon.com” in a browser address field, which will take the consumer straight to the e-commerce website.
Second, the e-commerce business might show up in a search result or embedded advertising link on another webpage, related or unrelated, to the e-commerce business. To be displayed in a ranked search result, the e-commerce business may partner with services such as Google Ads or Yahoo! Ads and purchase certain key words related to its business in order draw an automatic association between a searched key word (phrase, etc.) and the corresponding e-commerce business, thus ensuring that the e-commerce business shows up in the displayed results of a search engine webpage. These services often employ a “click through” payment method which charges e-commerce businesses a certain dollar amount each time an Internet user clicks on the URL link of the subscribing e-commerce business.
Third, an e-commerce business may choose to buy “on-line real estate”, that is advertise its products and services through some popular third party websites such as Facebook™, Groupon™, and home pages of sites such as CNN.com, NYTimes.com, etc. These sites may partner with e-commerce businesses and allow e-commerce ads to be placed on their sites or display pop-up ads when a user visits the site. This often involves significant time of a marketing department or employee to identify potential partnering websites and enter into agreements with the third parties to display ads on their sites.
Finally, some combination of the above methods may be used where an e-commerce business uses services such as Google or Yahoo! to purchase key words and define a relevant geography, product, and target consumer for its products and services, and also partners with third party sites to obtain on-line commercial real estate for e-commerce business advertisements. However, even with the current slate of options available to e-commerce businesses, e-commerce business owners must spend significant time, resources and capital in creating an advertising campaign, researching the appropriate search engines to use, defining a number of complex variables such as key words, target audience, geography, product category, products, product attributes, etc., and monitor and gather statistics on consumer behavior to determine what types of users and what types of sites are appropriate and effective for their advertisements.
Compounding this problem is the fact that user behavior, products, site content and key words and their associated back-end search engines are constantly evolving and changing. Small businesses often do not have the time or resources to hire graphic designers to create ads, marketing personnel to research and study effective sources and targets for advertising, and specialized information technology (IT) personnel that are familiar with third party advertising systems such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing™.
Recognizing the above-described problems, Lexity™ of Mountain View, Calif., has begun to provide e-commerce merchants with software encoding marketing actions that, when installed on a merchant website, generate and optimize advertisements/marketing for the merchant website. Lexity also provides software encoding marketing actions that, when installed on computer system(s) of the merchant, works “behind the scenes” managing advertising or providing information feedback to the merchants (e.g., via a Lexity user interface). Such marketing actions may be embodied as software applications (frequently referred to as “apps” in short). Lexity has developed a collection of such e-commerce applications, each application designed to optimize the merchant website in a specific way and/or configure computer system(s) of the merchant in a specific way (e.g., managing advertising of the merchant, providing feedback to the merchants, etc.). The inventors envision that in the near future, companies other than Lexity (i.e., “third-party marketers”) may start designing software applications having a similar purpose of assisting on-line merchants with their marketing and advertising needs. With the influx of marketing applications from both Lexity and third-party marketers, merchants will need help selecting one or more marketing actions (e.g., software applications) that are best suited (e.g., help the e-commerce businesses maximize their profit) for their websites and/or computer systems. To address this need, the inventors have developed a marketplace that brings together marketers and merchants. An important feature of the marketplace is a recommendation engine that automatically recommends certain e-commerce applications to a merchant.